Since the early 1980s, the area has changed greatly: it has moved upmarket.[1] It now is a fashionable district of expensive restaurants and media offices, with only a few sex industry venues. Some music venues survive, such as Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club. The area includes Carnaby Street, the centre of the 'Swinging London' fashion scene of the 1960s, and Wardour Street, a centre of the movie and entertainment industry.

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Soho was never an administrative unit with formal boundaries. It is an area of about a square mile, bounded by Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the west, Leicester Square to the south and Charing Cross Road to the east. Apart from Oxford Street, all of these roads are 19th-century metropolitan improvements.

John Snow mapped the addresses of the sick, and noted that they were mostly people whose nearest access to water was the Broad Street pump. He persuaded the authorities to remove the handle of the pump, thus preventing any more of the infected water from being collected. The spring below the pump was later found to have been contaminated with sewage. This is an early example of epidemiology, public health medicine and the application of science–the germ theory of disease.[3]

Almost every structure that stood on Broad Street in the late summer of 1854 has been replaced by something new... Even the streets' names have been altered. Broad Street was renamed Broadwick in 1936. The pump, of course, is long gone, though a replica with a small plaque stands several blocks from the original site on Broad Street... On Broad Street itself, only one business has remained constant over the century and half that separates us from those terrible days in September 1854. You can still buy a pint of beer at the pub on the corner of Cambridge Street, not fifteen steps from the site of the pump that once nearly destroyed the neighbourhood. Only the name of the pub is changed. It is now called The John Snow.[3]

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A replica of the pump, with a memorial plaque and without a handle (to signify John Snow's action to halt the outbreak) was erected near the location of the original pump.

There are also plans by Westminster Council to deploy high-bandwidth Wi-Fi networks in Soho as part of a programme to further encourage the development of the area as a centre for media and technology industries.